Thursday, August 4, 2011

Basic SEO Help

By Danny Reese


Choose your words: If you could launch a new website and be #1 on Google for a competitive keyword, everyone would be #1. It simply does not work that way and you should avoid any company that tells you otherwise. The goal is to find keywords that are not competitive at all and rank for them first. In time as your site ages and gains credibility, you can start going after more competitive keywords. However, starting out with the best keywords for your niche is just a waste of time. Do your research!

Onpage SEO: There are a million tricks that allegedly boost your ranking in the search engines by manipulating the words on any given webpage. This is true to an extent, but for the most part you should only really worry about using your keyword or keyword phrase in the page title, description, and at least twice in the text. Google claims to be able to figure out your keywords no matter what you do, but I find the title and description to be the most important. You may also be able to pick up a point or two using the H1 tag and perhaps making at least one instance bold.

Link Building: Despite what you have been told, most links are completely worthless. For the most part, you want links from similar pages to your own. A link from a good website about cars will not help you much if your website is about dogs. The only saying that every link helps is still true, but non relevant links certainly do not help much. Spend your time trying to get good links from relevant sites and leave the rest alone. Bad links do not help enough to make up for the time spent getting them.

Design: Make your site as nice as possible and use graphics with alt tags where you can. This keeps visitors on your site longer and makes other websites want to link to you. A site with just text is kind of boring and people will simply leave and go somewhere else. It does not take too much longer to make your site stick out a little.

Top 10: This is kind of old school, but it still works to this day. Many webmasters like linking to interesting lists to add value to their own sites. These inbound links will not only help your list page, but will also help your overall site.

How to: Nothing generates more links than a well written step-by-step guide. Whenever you solve a problem in your daily life, create a quick page of what you did to fix your issue. This is traditionally bad traffic, but the links these types of pages generate will more than make up for your time spent.

Info Graphics: These have increased dramatically in popularity over the last year or so. Many people like to read these and subsequently link to them from their blog or website. I have not had much luck with them, but frankly have not put in too much time. The top SEO guys feel they are the best link bait out there, so I will certainly keep trying.




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